Deeply Vale — Honouring the Human

This marks the beginning of a project that has been a seed in my heart for a long time.

There is a wild, isolated valley in a northern spur of the Pennines that, for a short blaze of time, held a small community of mill workers. They served water - and later steam - powered mills that now lie in ruin, entangled in ivy and moss.

At Deeply Vale they built cottages - had a pub in a parlour - and drew their water from nearby springs. It’s all gone now - just lumps and bumps in the ground.

And yet something remarkable has happened.

The Cheesden Brook - a watery remnant of a glacial thrust that cut the valley here - has meandered off course. Over time it has softened the man-made leats and cut into a midden. It’s a layer-cake of artefacts and objects - shoes, ceramics, glass, pattern ware, bottles, medicinal items - late Georgian to mid C20th, all mixed as one.

What these fragments reveal is a remarkably diverse community of extraordinary, ordinary lives - with traces of Scots and Irish, and economic migrants from Suffolk - navigating the dangerous and choppy hills of the Pennines in desperation to find better lives on the banks of the Industrial Revolution.

Especially in times like these, this work feels important not simply because it speaks of one small, forgotten community in the northern hills, but because it touches something universal - our shared need to recognise human lives as meaningful, to resist their erosion into statistics or footnotes, and to affirm that dignity, hope, and belonging matter everywhere.

Something deep within drives me to find ways of honouring ordinary people who have been caught up in the vortex of circumstance and forgotten – of standing against the tide that dilutes what it is to be human – and of affirming that every single individual counts.

My way is through making an art book - embraced by an old Victorian cover - gilded with words. On the papers within, I’ll sketch as many of the artefacts as possible. And in another layering up of joy within the project, I'll be asking Adam Jurkojc - time-travelling-book-binder - who I photographed through Member Powered Photography - to make the art book for the project.

Whilst drawing up the spirit of the observed through eye and mind, arm and hand, pen and ink and watercolour, I’ll share with you what they say to me.

Through the philosophy of Kintsugi, we can fill the cracks with art - and allow those lives to shine again in memory. It’s a kind of work that I hope will echo outwards from the microcosm of a hidden valley into the wider world.

I wouldn’t be able to contemplate this work without the support of Memberships - they give me the time and space. Members will share the backstory - and have access to the outcomes, including prints and visual material as the work unfolds.